Few things have become as frustrating to college football fans as the November Tuesday rituals of the College Football Playoff rankings reveal. What started 12 years ago as a fresh break from the robotic BCS has degraded into a weekly sideshow of audacity and obstinacy.
Every November, a collection of athletic directors, former coaches, and assorted college football insiders emerges from behind closed doors to tell the rest of the country what it supposedly got wrong about the sport it has spent the previous two months watching. The criteria seem to shift with the circumstances, the explanations often raise more questions than they answer, and the committee's insistence that it knows best has become as predictable as the outrage that follows.
Yet somehow, as college football's power brokers continue debating the future of the playoff, the conversation remains fixated on the wrong problem.
Four teams. Twelve teams. Sixteen teams. Now up to 24 teams, and probably even more.
The prevailing assumption seems to be that expanding the field will somehow cure what ails the College Football Playoff. But adding more teams to a fundamentally flawed selection process doesn't fix anything. It simply moves the controversy from the 12th team to the 24th or whatever arbitrary cutoff the sport eventually settles upon.
The biggest problem with the College Football Playoff has never been how many teams get invited. It's how those teams are chosen.
And until college football confronts the quite obvious failure of its selection committee experiment, every discussion about expanding the playoff is little more than rearranging the furniture in a house with a crumbling foundation.
The College Football Playoff committee is the problem nobody wants to fix
At some point, college football needs to acknowledge that its grand experiment in human judgment has been a massive failure.
The idea seemed reasonable enough in 2014. Assemble a group of people with extensive football backgrounds, put them in a room together, give them access to every imaginable statistic and piece of film, and let them determine which teams have earned the opportunity to compete for a national championship.
What could possibly go wrong? Twelve years later, we've gotten our answer. Repeatedly.
Everything.
The committee operates with loosely defined criteria that can apparently be rearranged like refrigerator magnets depending on which teams are being considered. Strength of schedule matters... until it doesn't. Head-to-head results are important... except when other factors suddenly become more important. Wins and losses count, although the committee seems more interested in what it thinks would happen if two teams hypothetically played on a neutral site than what actually happened when they did (we hear you, Tennessee).
And every Tuesday, we're handed yet another explanation of why the latest list of inconsistencies makes perfect sense if we would just stop asking so many pesky questions.
The 2023 exclusion of undefeated Florida State should have been the moment college football seriously reconsidered the entire process. The Seminoles won every game on their schedule, captured the ACC championship, and watched the committee decide that an injury to quarterback Jordan Travis outweighed everything they had accomplished over the course of the season.
Whether Florida State would have beaten the teams selected ahead of it became the central debate, which was rather convenient considering nobody would ever have to prove the answer on a football field.
Two years later, the 2025 debate between Notre Dame and Miami was another reminder of how much creative freedom the committee has. Miami's head-to-head victory eventually helped the Hurricanes move ahead of the Fighting Irish in the final rankings, after Notre Dame had been consistently placed ahead of Miami in previous rankings.
The committee's cruel version of, "Just kidding"?
These debates are precisely why college football needs a selection mechanism capable of applying consistent standards before the arguments begin. Instead, we've been force-fed a system where the standards themselves become part of the argument.
Arguably, the greatest accomplishment of the CFP committee is that they somehow managed to make people nostalgic for computers deciding football championships. The "Bring back the BCS" chant and hashtag seem to grow exponentially as time passes.
College football needs a formula before it needs more playoff teams
The BCS had plenty of problems, and anyone who lived through that era remembers the annual debates over computer rankings, poll biases, and the occasional mathematical gymnastics that left fans wondering whether someone had accidentally entered the scores from a bowling league.
But there was at least something appealing about a system built around actual measurements. Teams knew the general framework by which they would be evaluated, even if the formulas themselves weren't always very transparent.
College football has more sophisticated analytical tools available today. Strength of record, opponent-adjusted efficiency, strength of schedule, quality wins, and a myriad of other measurements can provide a detailed picture of what teams have actually accomplished.
The sport should be capable of developing a standardized formula that combines those measurements into a ranking system.
Give significant weight to the strength of the record. Account for the quality of opponents. Reward meaningful victories and recognize the difference between losing a close game against an elite opponent and getting embarrassed by a team that struggles to reach bowl eligibility.
And please, for the love of everything sacred about college football, establish the criteria before the season begins. Make it transparent. Make it obvious. And most importantly, keep it consistent every week.
A formula wouldn't eliminate controversy. No ranking system involving more than 130 FBS programs playing wildly different schedules will ever be foolproof. But it would establish a common set of rules that applies to Alabama, Indiana, Boise State, and everyone else.
There should still be room for human evaluation, although with considerably less power than the committee currently wields. Perhaps a small percentage of the overall ranking could come from a panel of evaluators applying the ever-popular "eye test". But any human component would require transparency, published standards, and a reasonable explanation (ie: not pods) whenever human judgment changes the outcome.
The committee could be a safeguard against the occasional statistical or personnel anomaly rather than a cabal of self-appointed football illuminati entrusted with interpreting the meaning of every Saturday.
And the public could actually see how teams earned their rankings. Imagine that.
College football has to quit putting new wipers on a cracked windshield
Once college football establishes a credible system for ranking its teams, the conversation about playoff expansion can finally become something resembling a productive discussion. There's no perfect solution on either side, but there is tremendous room for improvement.
There will always be a team sitting just outside the field with a complaint. The NCAA basketball tournament now includes 76 teams, and Selection Sunday still gives us enough outrage to power sports talk radio for a week.
The difference is that you don't hear a peep from the basketball committee until Selection Sunday. They let the season play out. The CFP Committee gives us weekly sleight-of-hand and Q&As that more resemble a presidential press conference. Expanding the playoff under the same structure merely gives that group more invitations to botch.
College football's decision-makers seem determined to keep debating whether the playoff should include 12, 16, 24, or more teams, as though the perfect number will somehow reveal itself after another round of meetings that center on television negotiations and conference commissioners protecting their respective territories.
Meanwhile, the same fundamental problem remains untouched, which is probably the most college football thing ever.
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